


who, what, when

by mutterandmumble



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Explicit Language, Fluff, M/M, No Plot, just idle conversation, unedited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:15:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25851967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutterandmumble/pseuds/mutterandmumble
Summary: Today Jon finished his paperwork right on time and now is over at Martin’s apartment. They’ve already got a medical drama queued up, and Jon’s breaking out the leftover fettuccine alfredo and Martin’s finally worked up the will to pull out the scarf he’s been making. The lights are a warm yellow-orange and it’s raining, but it’s the slow pitter-patter sort of rain and none of the earth-shaking, window-rattling thunderstorms they get sometimes, so there’s nothing loud or dangerous about it. It’s a good Friday night.Or: regarding bad television, semantics, a microwave with one foot in the grave, and odd hobbies
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 20
Kudos: 83





	who, what, when

**Author's Note:**

> This is sorta clunky, and by that I mean very clunky, but it was fun. Felt a bit different then my usual stuff, but still. Anyways, I hope you enjoy!!

These days, Martin’s found that good Friday nights are few and far between. That’s not to say that Friday nights don’t come around just as often as they did before because they _do_ ; this isn’t some sort of horror movie and time’s been moving in the same slow haze of paperwork and bureaucracy that it always does, and on second thought maybe this _is_ some sort of horror movie but it’s just not in any of the fun ways. Anyways, it’s not that most Friday nights aren’t nice on principle, because they _are-_ he doesn’t have to go to work the next day- but they’re not necessarily _good_ Friday nights. Generally the difference between a good Friday night and any other sort of Friday night (like a decent one or a pleasant one or an okay one) is one of two things, as follows:

First, semantics. Semantics are annoying- aggravating, irritating, bothersome, what does it matter- and Martin’s a poet so he loves and hates them in equal measure. He thinks that that may be a metaphor for something but he’s not quite sure yet so he’ll have to get back to you on that one.

Now second (and arguably more important) is company, particularly the company of his boyfriend, who Martin doesn’t get to see half as often as he would like to and who he misses very much. He and Jon got together a few months ago in a long story that involves more cups of tea than he can count, several drunken karaoke nights, and one pomeranian puppy. It’s all very sappy and saccharine sweet and everything that he could have hoped for, because the part of Martin’s brain that likes to describe the snow on the streets and the snow on the rooftops and the glimmer of the streetlights when the sky’s gone russet-red is also very sappy and saccharine sweet, like candy or honey or honey again but used as a pet name this time. That sort of thing. 

Regardless, Martin’s relationship with Jon isn’t exactly new anymore but it isn’t something so old as to be set in stone; there’s no standing dates, and no unspoken rules about things like which one of them gets the good mug or which one of them chooses the music in the car or which one of them  _ has  _ to sit on the left side of the couch because it doesn’t feel right otherwise. Because of that, and because of their hectic and often conflicting schedules and a good dose of emotional repression besides, it’s not always clear who will be staying where on any given night. 

But slowly, and in spite of most everything, they’ve been forming a routine. Martin goes to Jon’s on Monday nights with takeout that he picked up from the restaurant by the Old Bookstore with the Cat (the shop may or may not have an actual name, he’s not sure) and then they curl up and watch a documentary and Martin says that he has to go home but falls asleep on the couch instead, and then he has to rummage through the drawer in the dresser that is  _ his  _ drawer in the dresser but that they do not acknowledge as such because that seems like a capital-T Thing and capital-T Things are Sunday night conversation. On Wednesday nights they alternate; Martin’s apartment-Jon’s apartment-Martin-Jon-Martin-Jon. And then on Fridays they meet up at Martin’s after they’ve completed their respective workloads, and though they can’t  _ always  _ stick to the schedule, when they can it’s a good Friday night.

Today Jon finished his paperwork right on time and now is over at Martin’s apartment. They’ve already got a medical drama queued up, and Jon’s breaking out the leftover fettuccine alfredo and Martin’s finally worked up the will to pull out the scarf he’s been making. The lights are a warm yellow-orange and it’s raining, but it’s the slow pitter-patter sort of rain and none of the earth-shaking, window-rattling thunderstorms they get sometimes, so there’s nothing loud or dangerous about it. Everything feels close and slow, the neighbors aren’t blasting music, and Jon is in the kitchen, talking loudly to the microwave (he likes to think out loud, will talk to anything from inanimate objects to animals to people who are paying attention to people who  _ aren’t  _ paying attention), and it’s a good Friday night.

Jon’s finishes berating the microwave and makes his way over from the kitchen, one plate balanced in each of his hands and two forks that were pulled from the drawer twice-removed from the refrigerator and stuck straight up like a flag into each pile of pasta. His hair is coming out of its bun but his hair is  _ always _ coming out of its bun no matter how many times he puts it back up, so by this point in the day he just lets it happen. He’s got his displeased face on (though maybe it’s more exasperated, fucking  _ semantics _ ) and he only looks more ruffled the closer that he gets, bristly and prickly and  _ miffed  _ is probably the word that Martin looking for but he doesn’t like how it sounds- too much like muppet and mitten and muffin and none of those are words that he can take seriously- so the search continues. 

“Your microwave is shit,” Jon announces as he places both plates on the coffee table, very meticulous, very careful. “Ineffective. Every time I go to cook something it seems to heat it a different amount.”

“That’s because it does,” Martin tells him, putting his knitting to the side for a moment to prod at his food and see just how bad it is this time. Half of the noodles are freezing cold and the other half are hotter than asphalt in the middle of summer, which seems about right. It really is a shitty microwave. “I got it used off of ebay and I’ve had it for about four years now. It’s dying. It’s been dying for the past six months.”

Jon looks at him in disbelief, glasses slipping all the way down the bridge of his nose which is making Martin a little nervous because Jon is notorious around the office for breaking his glasses like Tim breaks hearts or Sasha breaks minor laws or Martin breaks important artifacts being tagged for storage. The rain is getting louder outside, and the TV screen is flashing a message- asking if they’re still there, growing impatient. Martin presses at the volume button on the remote until it goes away. 

“Why don’t you replace it?” Jon asks in a tone that is not incredulous but more incredulous adjacent, a newer version of his  _ trying not to be rude  _ tone that he picked up from someone recently- not Martin, because Martin’s is more aggressively polite, so one of their other friends then. Martin will figure it out later because he won’t be able to stop thinking about it otherwise. 

Martin shrugs. “I’m curious. Want to see how long it’ll last.” 

Which is true, if a little morbid. Martin doesn’t use the microwave much anyways, because he usually cooks and he usually is pretty good at cooking the right amount of food for the right amount of people. Martin’s always liked cooking to no real end- it’s a little, unnurtured part of himself, like a baby bird but that baby bird never left the nest and instead learned how to make a wide array of mediocre meals. It’s a whole thing, but not a capital-T Thing which means that he doesn’t  _ have  _ to think about it, and if Martin doesn’t  _ have  _ to think about things like missed opportunities then well he isn’t  _ going _ to.

“And when it inevitably dies?” Jon sputters, making a sharp little gesture with his fork. Evidently he’d decided at some point that the microwave had done a good enough job, and he’s begun picking his way through his meal. He’s trying his best not to screw up his face with every lukewarm bite, and it’s not working but Martin appreciates the effort. 

“Viking funeral in the ditch out back,” he says. “We’ll have to wait for it to rain again first, but that’s the plan.” 

He goes for a bite of his food. He immediately regrets it, but he'll live so he chokes it down and then goes for another, and maybe he  _ should  _ replace that microwave soon, but he can’t exactly say that now. So instead he tries his hardest to power on through, even as he finds that the sauce is congealed in some places and the plate feels soft in a way that makes him suspicious and a noodle he picks up from the very edge or it nearly cracks one of his front teeth in two. 

“I’m going to start the show,” he says after that one, and then he places the plate on the coffee table because he’s only so strong and for now he’ll just hope that at some point the whole thing will cool to lukewarm and actually become edible. It’s a longshot, yes, but Martin is some approximation of an optimist, like one that was left out in the cold for a little too long and hey, hey now something’s a bit off, but the gist is still there so he learned to work with it. Jon takes a few more bites of his own pasta in a valiant but short-lived effort before he follows suit, sliding his plate onto the table with a grimace. Martin doesn’t comment, just picks up the remote from where it had fallen to the floor (when and why and how it got there he doesn’t know) and presses play and picks his knitting back up as the opening chimes of the show ring out over the ever-present rumbles of the rain. 

Jon hums, staring off in that way he does when he’s only half-listening to the conversation. He fidgets some, pulls the blanket that Martin keeps on the couch out from behind his back and curls up beneath it instead. The show starts; it delves right into one of the many plotlines that it ended on last time, the one with the love triangle but none of the parties have any real chemistry so it’s more like a series of disconnected dots and some awkward pseudo-romantic orchestral music playing in the background. It gets a good two minutes in without either of them saying anything, which has to be some sort of new record, when Jon turns to him and says with no preamble at all: “Maybe it’s cursed. The microwave. Maybe it’s cursed.”

It’s more plausible than a decent romantic plotine between any of the characters on their show, so Martin takes a moment to consider it, to  _ actually  _ consider it, but there’s one big issue with that theory. 

“It can’t be,” Martin says. “I’ve already got something that’s cursed and there’s only room for one.”

_ Click, click, click  _ go his knitting needles in the following silence that isn’t really silence at all because the rain is still going and the show is still playing, but Jon’s eyebrows are raised high, high up, and his face is twisted into such a visceral display of disbelief that it makes the room  _ feel  _ silent. He blinks a few times, one two three, processing over and over again and coming to no real conclusion. 

“What?” he asks, and Martin didn’t really expect to make it this far so he coughs into his fist and makes a decision right then and there that if they’re going to have a ridiculous conversation then that conversation should at least be  _ properly  _ ridiculous, and well he started the bit so now he has to finish it and finish it strong.

“This! Right here!” he exclaims, making a wild gesture at his yarn, at the cable-striped mess of a scarf he’s been making, which also happens to be the first thing that he sees. It works though, because he’s been at it for three weeks with no progress and he’s not convinced that this scarf  _ isn’t  _ cursed. “I’ve been working on this scarf for fucking  _ weeks  _ and I swear I’m not getting any closer to being done so the yarn’s gotta be cursed. There’s no other explanation.”

“We’ve been busy at work so you’ve had less time for hobbies.” Jon says, and Martin elbows him lightly in the side because it’s too late for rational thinking. 

“Or it’s cursed.” 

Jon wrinkles his nose, and the glasses start slipping again. “It’s a scarf. Yarn. Why would yarn be cursed?”

“Why not?” Martin says, waving the needle with his stitches on it and risking everything on earth by doing so because god knows if he drops a stitch on  _ this _ particular pattern, on  _ this  _ particular scarf then the sky is going to fall. “I’ve seen the documentaries, I know that  _ you’ve  _ seen the documentaries, and if books and dolls and fucking-  _ tables  _ can be cursed, why not my yarn? Maybe someone looked at it and just thought that it was really ugly and then they just so happened to be magical or something so they cursed it. It could happen.”

“You brought it from that store in the mall,” Jon tells him. “Don’t you know the owner? Didn’t she give you a discount?”

“I don’t know what Linda does in her free time,” Martin fires back. “Maybe  _ she _ cursed the yarn and that’s why she gave me a discount.”

It makes sense to him; it does not, apparently, make sense to Jon who is staring at him like he’s three seconds from up and walking out of the apartment, just like that. 

“I would charge more for cursed yarn, not less,” Jon says, which is not the part of their conversation that Martin expected him to get hung up on, but he can work with that. “There’s a good market for that sort of thing if you know the right people.”

“You would know?” he asks, nudging at Jon’s side. The light from the TV flickers over the room, making everything look rather ghostly- Martin appreciates the dedication to the cause. No point in being unnecessarily dramatic if nothing is going to back you up on it. 

“Well yes,” Jon says. “A friend of mine and I did a lot of ghost hunting in college. I’m familiar with the business.”

He picks his plate up and tries for another bite, chewing hesitantly before nodding and going for another, and Martin would think that he were unaware of the bombshell that he just dropped if he hadn’t been staring at the TV with such a focused intensity that it’s clear he’s ignoring the way that Martin’s staring at the side of his head in blatant incredulity. Martin knows that Jon has a long-standing and through interest in the paranormal, but for some reason the more practical facets of that interest had never really crossed his mind, and now trying reconcile Jon as he knows him now with Jon as he would have been when he was  _ ghost hunting  _ in college-

Well, Martin can actually picture that pretty easily. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised. 

“Wait,” he says anyways, because surprised or not he  _ is  _ going to get some sort of explanation. “Wait, like actual  _ ghost hunting _ ? Like on tv? With the-” he makes a series of elaborate movements with his hands. None of them make sense. “The boxes? For the energy and stuff?”   
  


“Yes, we had equipment,” Jon sighs. He looks resigned, blanket loose around his shoulders and so much hair falling out of his bun that it’s more down then up by now. “That’s how I  _ know _ that there’s a market for this sort of thing.”

“Because _you_ are the market,” Martin gasps with all the proper amounts of drama. It is just one revelation after another today isn’t it? Shitty microwaves, Friday night semantics, boyfriend’s secret ghost hunting adventures. Business as usual.   
  


“Because I’m the market,” Jon agrees. He looks very tired and also a little bit like he’s trying not to laugh. He’s finished his plate by now too and places it back onto the coffee table with a clatter and no small amount of pride. The handle of the fork swings in a smooth half-circle, and Martin finds himself focusing on that because he’s having a  _ moment  _ and having a  _ moment  _ is all well and good, but it always puts him out of commission for a good thirty seconds at which point it’s not really a  _ moment _ anymore is it, and this is getting him nowhere. He was having a conversation.

“So you hunted for ghosts in college,” he says, still not fully able to believe it. “Anything else exciting? God, the most exciting thing that I did in college was lighting for our production of Romeo and Juliet, and I fucking  _ hated  _ it. Only joined up because one of my friends asked me and I couldn’t say no, so it’s not the best story.” 

Jon hums, turning his head to the side in what seems to be contemplation at first, but after he doesn’t say anything for a minute straight Martin figures that the conversation has died and turns back to the show. The rain has lightened up again, and one of the characters on the screen is giving yet another long-winded monologue about the merits of being with  _ him  _ over the other guy. Do they ever talk about anything else? Does anyone in fake-drama hospital ever practice actual  _ medicine _ ? Martin hopes not. They’d be a hazard to fake-drama society, though he guesses that that’s probably the point. Fake-drama people stirring up shit in fake-drama hospital, doing fake-drama surgeries and making eye contact that isn’t charged at all but is played like it’s meant to be. Martin has some  _ opinions  _ about the residents of fake-drama hospital though, and he’ll tell anyone about them because it makes for good water cooler conversation, but even then-

“Me and that same friend were in a band together,” Jon says, again with no explanation or lead-in or  _ anything _ , and Martin’s soul just about leaves his body. He hopes that the people who are stuck with putting it back in are more competent than the doctors of fake-drama hospital. 

“A  _ band _ ?” he yelps. His knitting nearly goes flying but he saves it and it’s not like he couldn’t have dealt with a dropped stitch or two now that he’s learning things that are  _ important,  _ holy  _ fuck.  _ “An actual band? One that played music in bars or parks, or- god, I don’t know, cafes? What kind of music? I feel like you guys played like, rock. Punk. Punk rock. Did you guys play punk rock?”

“Oh, look at that,” Jon says, changing the subject with all the tact of a train wreck as he tugs at his blanket and again refuses to look at Martin, though it’s even  _ more  _ pointed this time. “They’re introducing another character into the love triangle. It’s a love square now. A bold choice, but I’m sure they’ll fuck it up as spectacularly as they do everything else.”

Jon is still bitter about the last twenty plotlines revolving around cheating and frankly Martin is too, but they’re on season twelve and he figures that the writers started running out of ideas about three love triangles, two abandoned weddings, and one secret child ago. Regardless. there are more pressing matters. Like the fact that Jon was in a  _ band  _ with his friend that he went  _ ghost hunting  _ with _.  _

“Did you guys have a name?” Martin continues. “Or flyers or something? Do you have  _ pictures _ ?”

“OH LOOK,” Jon repeats, louder this time and very visibly flustered. Martin has to tamp down the urge to break into laughter. “HE JUST CHEATED ON HIS WIFE.”

“Again?” Martin says, momentarily diverted to the screen where yes, Character # 3 has indeed just cheated on his wife for the second time this season. “Damn. I really thought they would make it this time.”

“I think the longest a relationship has ever lasted on this show was six months,” Jon says. He’s right of course- Jon’s unnervingly good at remembering things like that sometimes. He’s also not subtle at  _ all.  _

“Do you think that any of  _ them  _ were ever in a band?” Martin wonders, and Jon promptly throws one of the decorative pillows at him. Martin laughs, and then he really  _ does  _ drop his knitting and both of their efforts are turned towards the frantic retrieval of the yarn as it rolls underneath the couch and does it’s damndest to take the scarf (and consequently Martin, he would sooner die than mess up that stupid  _ scarf _ ) with it. They nearly crash into each other, and between that and the rain that has turned into a storm and the fork that just went flying off of a plate, any and all thoughts of Jon in a band or Jon going ghost hunting are pushed from Martin’s mind. 

He never does find out that night what sort of music Jon’s band plays- once his still mostly full plate of food goes flying, they have to turn their attention to getting the mess up before it has a chance to stain. But even between the frenzied scrubbing of the carpet and the scarf that has a stitch dropped right in its center (figures, really), this is a Friday night spent in company, which means that regardless of reality- and pesky things like semantics- it’s a good Friday night. And because it’s a good Friday night, it’s one that he’s going to be thinking about for days and days after this, thrown decorative pillows and fake-drama hospitals and all. 

All that that really means is that neither one of them is ever going to live any of this down. And, more importantly, that Martin is going to find out more about Jon’s band at  _ some  _ point even if it’s the last thing that he ever does. It’s the height of romance, he supposes; there’s him with his cursed yarn and his boyfriend with his secret, not-a-secret and  _ definitely  _ punk rock college band. Maybe they can go ghost hunting together next weekend. The dead lady that Tim swears is living in his attic can third wheel, can help keep the spirits high. Or when his microwave dies and they burn it out back and it comes back to haunt him with a vengeance,  _ then _ they can go ghost hunting; it’s foolproof, romantic, and memorable, and  _ fuck  _ the Institute, Martin should make a career out of giving dating advice, he’d be great at it. 

He’ll save that idea until the next good Friday night- it’s bound to get a good reaction, and he likes making Jon laugh because his eyes crinkle at the corners and he laughs with his whole body, shoulders and arms and all. It’ll give Martin something to look forward to anyways, and he’s found that that’s the key to getting through weeks and weeks worth of mediocre (and that’s it, that’s the word) Friday nights; the promise of the good ones, and all that comes with them.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you enjoyed!! I love hearing from you guys!!


End file.
